Teens should read great (but hard) books: 'Macbeth' is better than 'Hunger Games'

Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" can be a game-changer for students.

High school students should be asked to read classic books, writes Annika Hernandez, a former English teacher. It will be challenging, but it's worth it.

English teachers don't assign many books these days, only 2.7 per year, according to a New York Times survey, she writes. When students are asked to read more than a brief excerpt, "the most common high school books tend to be short, relatively modern works like The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, and Night, as well as a smattering of Shakespeare."

In “Stop Assigning Boring Books in English Class” in Education Week, Superintendent Erich May argues that teachers should assign books teenagers want to read, so they'll cultivate a love of reading. That's a waste of time, Hernandez writes.

Doug Lemov has written, “If you had asked me what I wanted to read in 7th grade, it would have been a sports biography. But a teacher handed me The Old Man and the Sea instead.

"Lemov realized that literature is not merely a source of entertainment, but also of meaning and beauty," Hernandez writes. (Two immigrant journalists, both of whom made their careers writing in English, told me they were transformed by reading The Old Man and the Sea in school.)

May wants students to learn to analyze what they read, so they can be citizens who "think for themselves," Hernandez writes. But English class should do more than develop skills. It should develop "knowledge of the literary canon," so students can develop cultural literacy.

If we "leave the canon to the English majors," as May suggests, that's a very tiny number of people, Hernandez writes. And many college English majors aren't reading the classics either. "According to the Open Syllabus database of the most-assigned books in college literature courses, Homer is #89, Emily Brontë is #98, and Dostoevsky doesn’t even make the list."

"These books speak to everyone, including academically struggling, screen-addicted teenagers," Hernandez writes. She taught a struggling reader who was transformed by playing Macbeth in the school play. But students need good instruction to love reading.

The prose in The Scarlet Letter and Wuthering Heights is “ugly," May writes. "It's not ugly," Hernandez responds. "It's hard. And in education, the most difficult pursuits are also the most vital."

Teachers can show students why a"boring" book is interesting, writes Peter Greene on Curmudgucation. "You introduce the ideas. You walk them through the hard parts and difficult language. You show them what is exciting and engaging about a work."

He once turned a class of non-collegebound seniors into Macbeth lovers.

Teachers should expose students to "different cultures and styles and views of How The World Works," he writes. They can give students permission to hate something, while pointing out why other people like it.

Sometimes "boring and uninteresting" are "code words for 'hard and confusing' and working through those barriers will help you as a teacher understand the barriers that your students are facing," Greene adds. "You're teaching not only reading and literature and culture and different ways of being human; you are also teaching how to be interested in something. That's work worth doing." 

In an eloquent essay, Daniel Walden, who teaches classics in the Honors College at University of Tulsa, makes the "left-wing case" for teaching Great Books in The Point Magazine.

He starts with the distinction between "liberal education, suitable for free persons who are to govern themselves and others, and servile education, suitable for those who are to be useful to others." Those on the left (and right) should agree that "education in a democratic society ought to prepare all people to lead meaningful lives in pursuit of a vision of the good, not merely to work as someone else’s employee or to serve a particular social function," he writes.

"The notion that students should mainly be acquiring 'skills' or 'competencies,' so prevalent in high-level discussions of education policy and in ranking school systems, rings hollow to anyone who has ever cared enough to become a teacher: one teaches because one has fallen in love and, like any lover, one wants to shout it from the rooftops, because in loving something we come to see that it is good, that it is something a person should want for themselves."

"It is not snobbish to show someone how to love something new," he concludes. "It is a gift."

Don't "meet students where they are," writes Walt Hunter, who teaches literature at Case Western Reserve, in The Atlantic. Teach the books you love yourself.

"The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books," he writes. "We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading."

Universities should embrace "deep education" in the liberal arts, argue writers in the Martin Center's inaugural issue of From the Academy.